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BlackRock takes an 80% stake in a 1-gigawatt campus that won't be operational until 2028, as traditional finance muscles into the AI buildout race
Meta and BlackRock just announced the kind of deal that makes you reconsider who’s actually building the AI future. The two are partnering on a $14 billion data center campus in El Paso, Texas, with BlackRock’s managed funds taking an 80% ownership stake. Meta keeps 20%.
The deal structure #
BlackRock is contributing roughly $4.9 billion in cash equity and leading approximately $12.5 billion in debt financing for the project. Meta’s contribution comes in the form of land and ongoing assets valued at around $2.3 billion, plus the company will receive a $1 billion distribution under the deal’s terms. Rather than owning the facility outright, Meta will lease computing capacity from it.
The campus is designed to deliver 1 gigawatt of computing capacity. Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan are advising Meta on the transaction. The facility is expected to become operational in 2028.
This isn’t Meta’s first rodeo with this kind of arrangement. The company previously struck a similar structured deal with private-credit firm Blue Owl for a data center project in Louisiana. The El Paso campus also builds on a commitment Meta made back in March 2026, when the company announced over $10 billion in planned investment in the Texas border city.
Why Wall Street is rushing into AI’s plumbing #
For Meta, the math works differently. The company has committed to spending $600 billion on data centers by 2028. By off ownership to partners like BlackRock while retaining computing access through leases, Meta can deploy capital more efficiently across its AI buildout without cratering its balance sheet.
What this means for crypto and digital asset investors #
The AI infrastructure buildout is creating a parallel demand curve for energy. When a single data center campus consumes 1 gigawatt of power, that’s capacity that isn’t available to Bitcoin miners competing for the same grid resources. El Paso sits on the Texas ERCOT grid, the same deregulated power market that crypto miners have flocked to for years.
BlackRock has been one of the most aggressive traditional finance players moving into tokenization, from its BUIDL fund for tokenized treasuries to its spot Bitcoin ETF.
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